In a recent announcement made on its official blog, Facebook confirms that it will now be reducing the exposure of posts (whether ads or organic) which link to low-quality web pages or pages with a poor experience. It is important to note that Facebook had been receiving complaints from its various users about the prominence of low-quality posts and ads in their newsfeeds. The present update seems to be an effort to address it.

According to the brand, the aim of this update is to make users’ newsfeeds more informative and less misleading.

With this update, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads. We then used artificial intelligence to understand whether new web pages shared on Facebook have similar characteristics. So if we determine a post might link to these types of low-quality web pages, it may show up lower in people’s feeds and may not be eligible to be an ad. This way people can see fewer misleading posts and more informative posts. – Source

Facebook already has a policy about low-quality contents that asks advertisers and publishers not to make the posts deceptive to users, and not do anything on landing pages linking from the posts which disrupt the user experience. With this update, the enforcement of this policy becomes more aggressive.

So does it impact you as a Facebook advertiser or page owner?

If you are a publisher or advertiser who does not have low-quality landing page experience as highlighted in the update, it should not impact you adversely, on the contrary, you should see a small increase in your traffic. However, the publishers and advertisers who do have such contents and experiences on landing pages should see a decline in traffic.